Mona Hatoum

My works are full of associations and meanings – a reflection on the social environment in which we live. Unlike minimalist objects, they are not self-referential.
Mona Hatoum

The body as a canvas for social and political themes forms the basis of Mona Hatoum’s artistic practice. Born in 1952 to a Palestinian family in Beirut and having emigrated to London in 1975, she experienced the feeling of being an outsider first-hand, so to speak, which she translated into unsettling performances in the 1980s. Since the 1990s, she has been creating sculptures and installations in which the absent body, like the private home, serves as a metaphor for threat and vulnerability. Austere forms contrast with fragile materials; everyday objects feign comfort, yet reveal a latent danger. ‘I love using furniture in my work. It speaks of everyday life. […] When these objects appear unstable or threatening, they remind us of our own fragility.’ (Hatoum)

The ambivalence provoked by the artist points to the loss of the familiar and the tangible. In her work, Mona Hatoum expands the formal possibilities of Minimal Art to include the political and the existential. By transcending the self-referential nature of art, the artist has become an icon of the art world in recent decades, as evidenced by exhibitions at leading museums worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2015 and the Tate in London in 2016. In 2004 she was awarded the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, in 2010 the Käthe Kollwitz Prize, in 2011 the Joan Miró Prize and in 2019 the Praemium Imperiale Prize in Japan.

The Kunst Museum Winterthur has presented works by Mona Hatoum on several occasions in thematic exhibitions on sculpture and video art. Her solo exhibition will offer an in-depth insight into the work – as impressive as it is unsettling – of one of the leading contemporary artists.

Curated by Konrad Bitterli